On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 19:25, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@googlemail.com> wrote:
> In another thread Jira was proposed as an alternative to Trac. Can you point
> out some of its strengths and weaknesses, and tell us why you decided to
> move away from it?
The two primary reasons were that our Jira server was behind a
firewall and we wanted to open it up, and the integration with github,
where we were moving our source.
My own impression is that Jira is much more complicated. It was nice
that it was integrated with Fisheye and some reporting tools, but I
found them so complicated to deal with that I usually didn't go beyond
"show me my bugs", some bulk bug editing, and adding users to
projects. As a group, we had difficulties keeping track of how we
were indicating priority and planned work, even with wiki pages to
tell us what we intended the different labels to mean. Jira's
integration with other tools (Fisheye, Crucible) was useful in some
ways, but in no way critical. There were all kinds of reports (LOC,
bug count, etc.) that one could get from these, but nothing that
couldn't be created with pylab and a free hour or two.
I like github's issues for their simplicity and the http-based API.
We miss having direct attachements, but we have a workaround. It
would be nice if the github issues page were more customizable, but
with the API, a motivated group could create whatever frontend they
wanted.
Github's issues remind me of python, Jira reminded me of Java. I
guess Jira would be more suited to a large developments effort with
multiple groups of programmers, which we were not. Moving bugs from
Jira to github wasn't too bad (we dropped most of the metadata, except
for our current/next/future label for which release fixes would go
into). I think it would be easier to move from github to Jira,
primarily because github has fewer possible bits of metadata on each
bug.
As I said, I avoided using Jira for anything really complicated, so
perhaps I just needed to spend more time with it. My opinion should
probably not be given undue weight.